- From: Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com>
- Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 15:29:27 +1000
- To: "David Woolley" <forums@david-woolley.me.uk>, www-style@w3.org
On Tue, 17 Apr 2007 17:06:43 +1000, David Woolley <forums@david-woolley.me.uk> wrote: >> How is that ideal? You'd always need to know the markup language for >> the structural elements and the nesting of them, etc. Besides, for all >> text > > The structural elements are identified in the style sheet. Huh? > The reason for requiring explicit closing tags in XML, is > not the popularly believed one that it means that browsers > will reject invalid documents, or that HTML syntax is in some > way ambiguous, but so that the nesting structure of the document > is explicit in the document and the parser can recover it without > knowing anything other than XML syntax rules. Right... > The optional tags in HTML mean that whole elements can only be > inferred by knowing the detailed syntax of HTML. (Although, those > who want the supposed validation advantage of XML are free to make > all tags in HTML explicit (some older, tag soup, browsers can get > upset by having some of the end tags, though).) I don't think this discussion has anything to do with HTML or XML syntax. At least, that was way besides my point. >> documents distributed over the web you'd use a non-proprietary >> language, ideally. > > But those may be domain specific, e.g. an XML invoice's detailed syntax > needs to be known to an accounting program, but not when simply being > displayed to a human. That allows one to have efficient EDI formats, > with published specifications, which are still usable by people with > only generic software. It also means that generic software can edit a > document and provide visual feedback, removing the need to have editors > for every domain specific format. Domain specific formats would just be converted to HTML. It's already being done. -- Anne van Kesteren <http://annevankesteren.nl/> <http://www.opera.com/>
Received on Wednesday, 18 April 2007 05:30:40 UTC